Marty: Small Screen Roots, Big Screen Brilliance

Robert Redford’s 1994 film Quiz Show (which, by the way, received a Best Picture nomination) recreated the competition between nebbish Jew Herbie Stempel and handsome Gentile Charles Van Doren on the 1950’s Jeopardy!-style game show Twenty-One. In the film, the producers of the show have rigged the results to enhance the drama and create a national sensation. While both Stempel and Van Doren are brilliant men in their own right, each is seduced by the allure of fame and willingly plays along with the deception of the show; they are fed the answers and taught how to play up the drama. Stempel, the reigning champion as the film begins, does not have the star quality the executives on the show really want. He’s nerdy, a bit uncouth, too nebbish, and most unforgivably in the eyes of the anti-Semitic producers: too Jewish. Van Doren is photogenic, handsome, and comes from a wealthy family. Twenty-One’s producers see him as marketable and appealing. When Stempel and Van Doren clash, Stempel is told to throw the game. The decisive question: What movie won Best Picture in 1955 (Quiz Show is set in 1956, so the answer is a gimme)? The answer Stempel must give: On the Waterfront.

For Stempel, answering On the Waterfront instead of Marty is very nearly a deal breaker. He claims that it was his favorite film, he has seen it several times, and would consider it an indignity to answer that question wrong. Although Stempel does eventually compromise, when you watch Marty, it becomes clear why Stempel idolizes the picture. Marty describes himself as an ugly man. Unlovable. Painfully ordinary. Marty’s ordinariness becomes his endearing quality, and in Marty, men and women like Herbie Stempel found a kindred spirit. For once, a film showed one needn’t look like a matinee idol to find love and happiness. Of all the films ever awarded Best Picture, Marty is unquestionably the smallest in scale, yet in its celebration of the ordinary man, it proves to have the biggest heart.

Ironically enough, Marty began its life on television. The story originally debuted on television, broadcast on The Goodyear Television Playhouse on May 24th, 1953. (Another irony—The Goodyear Television Playhouse, like Twenty-One, were both programs on NBC, proving that both quality and corruption can exist on a single network.) The Goodyear Television Playhouse brought serious works of drama and theater to the home audience in a one hour program. Works popular on Broadway were condensed along with standalone original material. Marty, one of the latter, was scripted by Paddy Chayefsky (who is most famous for his searing script for Network) and proved to be quite successful and stood out amongst the fare it was aired with.

What is significant about Marty was that it went against the grain in terms of how Hollywood viewed television. TV was seen as a very serious threat to the movie studios in the 1950’s. Why would audiences pay good money to go out and see a movie when they can be entertained at home? Hollywood answered by giving audiences massive, spectacular films that television could not hope to recreate. This was the decade of the musical, of the epic, of the films adapted from great works of literature. Look at some of Marty’s Best Picture predecessors—An American in Paris, The Greatest Show on Earth, and From Here to Eternity fill out the bill for musicals, epics, and literary adaptations. Even All About Eve and On the Waterfront, with their marquee casts, pedigree filmmakers, and universal themes are larger than life in their own right, and could only work as feature films. In a decade of filmmaking where gigantic storytelling and gimmickry was seen as an absolute need (don’t forget, that the 1950’s were also the decade where 3-D, widescreen, and forgettable gimmicks like Aroma-vision were developed), Marty is tiny, unadorned and honest.

(Hell, the film was rumored to be a tax write-off for its producers, Harold Hecht and the actor Burt Lancaster. What bigger indicator of a throwaway project than that. In fact, in the trailer for Marty, Lancaster is seen introducing the picture, lending it some star power although Lancaster does not appear in a frame of the film itself. It is as if Lancaster doesn’t believe the story alone will sell the picture. Ultimately, when Marty became a critical and financial success—the film made back nearly ten times its budget—it made history as being the only film for which the Oscar campaign mounted for the picture cost more than the actual film itself. ($400,000 campaign budget against a $343,000 production budget, though it does seem like producers spend what it costs to make their film on many Oscar campaigns in recent history.))

Director Delbert Mann’s film traces roughly thirty-six hours in the life of its titular protagonist, butcher Marty Piletti (Ernest Borgnine). Marty is a lifelong bachelor in his thirties who lives at home with his overbearing Italian-American mother (Esther Minciotti) in the Bronx. Though Marty is a hard and dependable worker with a secure job, he has a grand total of zero romantic prospects. Partially due to his looks—Marty describes himself as a “fat, ugly man” (the stocky, round-faced Borgnine isn’t quite as hideous as his character describes himself as, but Borgnine is certainly not cut from traditional leading man cloth like his producer and From Here to Eternity co-star Lancaster)—and partially due to the constant browbeating he faces from his mother, Marty has become a large, decent man with absolutely no self-esteem. Marty is all-too aware of the price he has paid for his decency: “You don’t get to be good-hearted by accident. You get kicked around long enough; you become a professor of pain.”

Despite the fact that Marty has resigned himself to bachelorhood, Mrs. Piletti constantly harangues her eldest son into finding a girl. The fact that all of Marty’s younger brothers are married yet the oldest son is still single becomes a source of laughter in the community, and in many ways, reflects a failure on the part of Mrs. Piletti. Marty’s lack of romantic prospects becomes the primary source of conflict between mother and son: he is sick of rejection and heartbreak, she wishes to see her son happy. Ironically, Mrs. Piletti is clueless to what actually would make her son happy—some independence, for starters, and a chance to find love on his own terms. Furthermore, Mrs. Piletti secretly doesn’t want Marty to find love; she is absolutely terrified that if Marty does marry, she will be left utterly alone. Marty, in honest and direct terms, spells things out for his mother: “Ma, sooner or later, there comes a point in a man’s life where he’s gotta face facts. And one fact I gotta face is that whatever it is that women like, I ain’t got it.” It is a testament to the strength of Chayefsky’s script and the skilled performances of Borgnine and Minciotti that the lived-in bickering between mother and son—which the audience, is of course, witnessing with fresh eyes—seems eternal.

Mrs. Piletti wins the argument, and she convinces Marty to go to a community dance to meet women. Marty has his best friend Angie (Joe Mantell), tag along. Angie is an equally luckless bachelor, and when Marty says “I’ve been looking for a girl every Saturday night of my life,” one senses that the statement applies to Angie with the same fidelity, and that both men are burnt out in their search for female companionship. Again, Borgnine and Mantell make it appear that Marty and Angie have been best friends for a long time, and that their shared motivation for going to the dance springs not from the prospect of meeting women—both men dread the prospect of doing so by this point, they have a shared hopelessness in that regard—but simply because going out is a far better alternative than staying in and doing nothing and being bored. When the friends ask each other “So, what do you feel like doing tonight?”/ “What do you want to do tonight?” (This line became a 1950’s catchphrase), their fruitless search for women becomes a mundane, rote part of their weekly routines.

At the dance, Marty is unsurprisingly rejected when he asks a woman to dance. He wanders off by himself, and meets a 29-year old schoolteacher named Clara (Betsy Blair). Clara came with a couple and hoped to be set up with a man they were acquainted with, but Clara’s date has stood them up. Clara is called “a dog” by other men at the dance (Angie included), though if Clara has any strikes against her appearance, it is that she is spectacularly ordinary (Blair, while certainly no “dog”, benefits from her plain appearance in this role). Marty, sensing a kindred spirit begins to talk to Clara, and though both parties are apprehensive—Clara especially so—Marty finds that the pair have much in common. On a surface level, both are relatively committed to their careers and both live with and are devoted to their parents (with Clara, it is her father). On a deeper level, both Marty and Clara intuit that they are both people who have resigned themselves to never falling in love. Their shared outlook provides a foundation for the pair to begin a relationship.

Eventually, Clara and Marty warm to each other. Both Borgnine and Blair have, like every successful romantic pairing in the movies, perfect chemistry. In this case, things start perfectly awkward and timid. Borgnine and Blair understand that Marty and Clara have both been hurt in the past, both fear rejection and loneliness, and both can hardly believe that there is another person out there who feels the way the other does. Eventually, Marty and Clara warm up to each other, and both have found what has eluded them throughout adulthood: a potential partner. They spend the evening together, out so late that Marty has to take a taxi home after ushering Clara to her doorstep because the trains have stopped running. Marty kisses Clara as he leaves, and in a sublime movie moment, he giddily dances down the middle of the street. Borgnine makes this large, oafish man twinkle-toed, the picture of utter happiness. Marty’s dance down the street after his date with Clara is a moment as equally joyful as Jimmy Stewart running down the main street in Bedford Falls at the end of It’s a Wonderful Life, and frankly, the moment should be equally as famous.

The next day, Marty tells his mother how his date went and is met with reservation. It is here that Mrs. Piletti’s fears of abandonment are made explicit, and she puts it in Marty’s mind to renege on the promise he made Clara: to call her the day after the date. The final scene of the film finds Marty in the café that he frequents with Angie. Angie—peeved that Marty left him at the dance without telling him where he was going—also doesn’t approve of Marty’s matchup with Clara. Marty though, sees through Angie’s anger and realizes that Clara represents an opportunity at love that he would be foolish to throw away (Mantell also plays the role with a touch of obvious jealousy, and like Mrs. Piletti, the fear of abandonment is writ large over his face). Marty tells Angie:

“You don’t like her. My mother don’t like her. She’s a dog and I’m a fat, ugly man. Well, all I know is I had a good time last night. I’m gonna have a good time tonight. If we have enough good times together, I’m gonna get down on my knees and I’m gonna beg that girl to marry me. If we have a party on New Year’s, I got a date for that party. You don’t like her? That’s too bad. Hey Ange, when are you going to get married?”

The final moments of the film have Marty inside a telephone booth, making good on his promise to call Clara.

Marty is an honest film dealing with ordinary love. Atypical of romantic films, Marty does not adhere to the characteristics of its genre. Unlike It Happened One Night—a film I would categorize as prototypical—Marty doesn’t have leads who “meet cute” (and they certainly aren’t played by marquee stars like Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert—Borgnine and Blair are character actors). They are a pair of kindred spirits, not opposites who attract. Marty and Clara are very much, almost painfully ordinary, unlike Peter Warne, who is popular and likable, and Ellie Andrews, who is essentially a princess. Marty and Clara don’t have glamorous jobs—they’re a butcher and a teacher, not a star reporter and heiress. There is no love at first sight, a sweeping off the feet, or a mad dash for the marriage altar. There is simply a promise to make a follow-up date that is adhered to, a possibility of happiness. In Marty, there is romance but there is no bullshit.

And really, how many real-life romances and couplings are as zany as the movies make them out to be? Do any of us meet our spouses-to-be under wacky circumstances or are they more mundane? Do we really fall immediately in swooning love? Are we really attracted to our bickering opposites—and I’m not talking in a lustful manner here, I think everyone in some manner has a physical attraction to otherness—or when we seek out someone for a long-term relationship, do we look more for partners with whom there are shared characteristics? Do first dates go smoothly or awkwardly? Marty always errs on the side of realistic answers to those questions.

Reality is what attracted Herbie Stempel to the film. Marty showed that an ordinary man—one who, God forbid, may be considered a bit of a loser—resigned to bachelorhood can defy the odds and find a soul mate. (And another great thing about the film: it neither judges nor celebrates Marty and Clara’s resignation to be single; it presents it as it is. If anyone is condemned in the film it is Mrs. Piletti and Angie, who try and force Marty to act in ways that go against his heart.) Stempel was an ordinary guy—God forbid, a bit of a loser too—who also defied the odds and got to win money on a game show. The film resonated with ordinary folks worldwide. The French loved Marty; it was one of only two Best Picture winners that also received the Palme d’Or, top prize at the Cannes Film Festival (Billy Wilder’s The Lost Weekend is the other film).

Marty is a testament to the virtues of realism and honesty. It says that what is ordinary is also beautiful.


DETAILS

Marty (1955)

Director: Delbert Mann

Starring: Ernest Borgnine, Betsy Blair, Joe Mantell, Esther Minciotti

Studio: United Artists

Total Oscars: 4 (Best Picture*—Harold Hecht, Best Director—Delbert Mann, Best Actor—Ernest Borgnine, Best Adapted Screenplay—Paddy Chayefsky) from 8 total nominations (Best Supporting Actor—Joe Mantell, Best Supporting Actress—Betsy Blair, Best Art Direction (B&W), Best Cinematography (B&W)
*At 91 minutes, Marty is the shortest film to ever win Best Picture

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From Here to Eternity: Irresistible Forces, Immovable Objects

Part of the fun in writing these series of blogs is coming up with the subtitles. Originally, this piece was going to be subtitled From Here to Eternity: Blue Hawaii, for the sense that the overall mood of From Here to Eternity is rather blue—be forewarned, this is an awfully depressing picture—and I wanted to play ironically off the title of the 1961 Elvis Presley film, which is completely unlike the 1953 Best Picture winner aside from their setting in the fiftieth state. Frankly, I also didn’t know how to come up with an approach to reviewing the film aside from recapping it (which I think I have done too much in some postings).

Thankfully, I read Seattle’s finest alternative weekly newspaper, The Stranger.

The movie reviews in The Stranger have a reputation for being both awfully snarky and extremely negative. In fact, outright disdain is shown toward the vast majority of mainstream films released each week. One area The Stranger does cover well is the older films being revived at Seattle’s independent movie houses. In June, Seattle’s Grand Illusion theater on University Way and 50th Ave NE—which is basically a garage with a couple dozen seats and a movie screen (and where I saw Clint Eastwood’s 1992 Best Picture winner, Unforgiven, for the first time)—screened From Here to Eternity, and this is what Stranger reviewer Charles Mudede had to say:

“In the classic From Here to Eternity, we see a contrast between the lives of little people and a major historical event. The little people are prostitutes, slutty housewives, horny soldiers, alcoholic bachelors, and psychologically needy boxers. Their lives are going nowhere. Their lives are stuck on an island. Their lives are disrupted by one of the most significant events of the 20th Century, the attack on Pearl Harbor. The most famous scene of the movie—the bodies of the kiss-locked lovers on the beach washed by the foaming (spermatic) waves of the ocean—is not only erotic but also (more importantly) Thanatonic. The wave is the force of history, and the lovers are the little lives that are washed away and forgotten.”
(And hey, for those not up on their Greek Mythology, Thanatos is the daemon personification of Death—but in Mudede’s usage he is referring to the psychological concept of people who willfully participate in thrill- or death-seeking behaviors, which absolutely applies to this film. And don’t feel stupid; I had to look it up.)

What struck me about Mudede’s capsule review was the last line—“The wave is the force of history, and the lovers are the little lives that are washed away and forgotten.” That line perfectly encapsulates the theme of From Here to Eternity, where conflicts between the characters are played for maximum dramatic irony. No matter what happens in the film, we as viewers have the foreknowledge that on the morning of December 7th, 1941, all conflicts will be rendered moot. The characters in the film become the irresistible forces that draw the audience into From Here to Eternity; history becomes the immovable object that crashes unsuspectingly down upon them, turning the picture into a tragedy.

The film is made up of a series of characters and events that collide in powerful and ultimately tragic ways. Let’s start by examining that sex on the beach (and in 1953 the scene was as explicit then as graphic sex is now) kiss between Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr. First, the obvious irony. If you’ve ever seen an Oscar ceremony in the past twenty years, chances are you’ve seen this famous clip. If all you knew about From Here to Eternity was that kiss and decided, “Hey, that movie looks nice and passionate and romantic, let’s check it out,” you would be in for a surprise. For as dreamy and romantic as the scene plays out of context, the relationship between Lancaster’s Sgt. First Class Milton Warden and Kerr’s desperate military housewife Karen Holmes plays out in ways that are anything but.

Sgt. Warden is a career military man, an NCO (non-commissioned officer) that rose up through the ranks to attain his status. Warden is the “top-kick” to Captain Dana “Dynamite” Holmes (Philip Ober), a career officer who cares only about the inter-regiment boxing matches and how they can raise his profile to be considered for the rank of Major (Capt. Holmes reminds me very much of Lieutenant Scheisskopf—German for “shithead”—from Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22, who cared only about winning parade marches and using them to rise through the ranks). Holmes is an incompetent and lazy leader (as is Scheisskopf) who heavily relies on the efficient and hard-working Holmes to run the operations of his unit. Holmes also cheats on and neglects his wife Karen (again mirroring Heller’s creation), and when Warden hears from one of Karen’s former lovers (George Reeves) stationed at Schofield Barracks, he is irresistibly drawn into an affair.

Cut to the passion contained in the famous Eternity Cove kiss, and you would think that everything works out swimmingly for Sgt. Warden and Karen. Wrong. The characters each have an immovable stubbornness that their relationship is unable to overcome. While Warden fills Karen’s emotional and sexual needs, he is unwilling to provide her stability and upward mobility. Karen will only get a divorce from her husband if Warden will enlist in an officers training program. Warden is immensely proud that he has risen through the ranks as an NCO; he despises officers, and feels that he wouldn’t be true to his soul if he became one. As an additional complication, Warden risks being sent to federal prison if the affair is discovered—an NCO sleeping with an officer’s wife is a serious offense, and if Warden becomes an officer, Karen can file for divorce without condemning him. Even after the situation becomes less complicated, and despite the fact that the pair love one another, Warden remains steadfast—he will not become an officer. Karen describes him as “being in love with the army,” and the affair ends in unhappiness and heartbreak for both of them.

The other male lead, Robert E. Lee “Prew” Prewitt, played by Montgomery Clift, is as immovably stubborn as Sgt. Warden when it comes to being “married to the Army” and upholding a deep sense of personal honor. Prew is renowned for two unique skills—his bugling and his boxing—and they both get him into trouble. His transfer to Schofield comes about via a dispute with his previous top-kick, who passed Prew over as top bugler for a friend who was inferior. He is also regarded as a sensational middleweight, and Capt. Holmes irresistibly covets his skills to capture the regimental boxing championship. Yet Prew inadvertently blinded a man in his last boxing match, and he vows to never again set foot into a boxing ring. Both episodes prove that Prew is completely willing to buck authority when his personal honor is challenged, a decision carries unfavorable consequences. Capt. Holmes warns him: “You should know that in the Army it's not the individual that counts.” Warden encourages Prew—“You gotta play ball”, but Prew tells him, “A man don't go his own way, he's nothin'.” Prew’s principle causes him to become alienated from his company, and he is assigned “The Treatment” from Holmes, where Prew receives all of the KP duties, extra laps during exercises, longer marching practice, and peer pressure and harassment from the boxers on Holmes’ team who try and manipulate Prew into joining. Again, the irresistible forces between two immovable objects—in this case Prew’s obstinate individuality and Holmes’ abuse of authority—lead to disastrous consequences for the protagonist.

Prew also engages in a doomed relationship, which plays out just as predictably as Sgt. Warden and Karen’s. Prew’s lone friend—Maggio (Frank Sinatra, in his Best Supporting Actor Oscar-winning role, which he purportedly used his mafia connections to secure), takes him out for a night of revelry in Honolulu. They make their way to the New Congress Club, a whorehouse (called, of course, a gentleman’s club where the girls are called hostesses) popular with the soldiers on Oahu. There, Prew catches the eye of Lorene (Donna Reed), dubbed “the Princess” because of her aloof manner with the soldiers. Perhaps because of their status as outsiders within their professions, Prew and Lorene begin a relationship and open up to one another, with Prew revealing his tragic past and Lorene revealing her real name as Alma.
The deeper Prew and Alma fall in love, the more complicated things become. For starters, both of their jobs are in jeopardy if their relationship is discovered, though Alma is at greater risk. Their off-island plans are discussed, and Prew says he’s “a 30-year man” with the Army, though Alma cannot fathom why Prew would love an institution which is causing him so much angst. Prew tells her that after his parents died, the Army was his only refuge and that “A man loves a thing. That don’t mean it’s gotta love him back. You love a thing, you gotta be grateful.” He later proposes marriage to Alma, but she declines, knowing full well that Prew, like Warden, loves an institution first. Yet like Karen, she also craves stability, and she tells Prew:

“I won't marry you because I don't want to be the wife of a soldier...Because nobody's gonna stop me from my plan. Nobody, nothing. Because I want to be proper...Yes, proper. In another year, I'll have enough money saved. Then, I'm gonna go back to my hometown in Oregon and I'm gonna build a house for my mother and myself, and join the country club and take up golf. And I'll meet the proper man with the proper position to make a proper wife who can run a proper home and raise proper children. And I'll be happy because when you're proper, you're safe.”

Again, an irresistible love cannot overcome immovable stubbornness in both principals.

The final—and most traditional—irresistible force/immovable object relationship in From Here to Eternity is between Maggio and his nemesis, Sgt. James R. “Fatso” Judson (Ernest Borgnine). Maggio is a traditional foil to Prew. While Prew is a stubborn individualist, he is also a model soldier. No matter how much punishment is dished his way, Prew doesn’t complain or bitch. He complies, no matter how unfair the punishments may be. Maggio is the opposite of Prew—undisciplined and without principle. Where Prew rebels as an act of individuality, Maggio rebels for kicks (though to be fair, Maggio is the only soldier who sticks up for Prew, and his loyalty sometimes earns him punishments alongside his friend).

Maggio is also prone to instigation. When in the New Congress Club, Fatso is loudly and poorly playing the piano. Maggio would do well to ignore Fatso—especially given the brutal reputation he has earned as sergeant of the stockade, not to mention Fatso outranks Maggio—but like moth to flame, he cannot help but tell him to pipe down. Fatso responds by calling Maggio “wop”, and the racial slur only incenses the situation. Maggio is bailed out by Prew, and on another occasion, Sgt. Warden, but ultimately, Fatso tells him “Tough monkey. Guys like you end up in the stockade sooner or later. Someday you'll walk in. I'll be waitin'. I'll show you a couple of things.” Maggio, unable to resist his passions for disobedience, walks off of guard duty, gets drunk, and ends up under Fatso’s tyranny in the stockade. Maggio’s actions have fatal consequences—Maggio escapes but not before suffering a beating that eventually kills him. Prew avenges his friend, and mortally wounds Fatso in a knife fight, and he is forced to also go AWOL to avoid murder charges.

Each of the subplots reaches a point where male protagonists become free to make changes. Prewitt eventually earns the unconditional respect of Sgt. Warden, who calls Prew “the best stinkin’ soldier in the whole Army.” After Fatso is killed, Warden knows that Prew took revenge, and covers up for his friend by keeping him on the rolls while he is AWOL at Alma’s cottage. At the same time, Warden leaks the abuses of power Capt. Holmes has shown towards Prew, and the Captain is forced to resign his position rather than face court-martial. This leaves Warden as a natural successor to Holmes, and with his loyalty to Prew, Prew could rejoin the ranks or abscond stateside with Alma. Of course, neither man does the sensible thing in regard to their romances, and on the day Warden and Karen break up, Director Fred Zinnemann gives the audience an establishing shot of a calendar, the date reading December 6th, 1941. Even if Warden opted to become an officer and Prew realized he could find as much comfort in Alma as he does in the Army—or conversely, if the women could learn to live with men who are mere soldiers—history awaits them all the next day, when the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor and an entire nation—not just simply the fates of four lovers—is irrevocably changed.

Zinnemann directed a film that wisely plays off the audience’s anticipation of the inevitable. This isn’t a flashy picture. Zinnemann directs From Here to Eternity with a steadfast and even hand, allowing the audience to become enraptured by the melodrama. The actors give considerable aid to the director in creating characters so alive, so palpable that you give yourself wholly to Zinnemann’s adaptation of James Jones’ praised 1951 novel of the same name. The men each play up to type—Frank Sinatra is perfect as a carefree soldier, Ernest Borgnine looks exactly like a bullying heavy, Burt Lancaster is the chameleon—at ease being a leading man but with enough of an edge to keep him interesting, and nobody in Hollywood ever played sensitive men of smoldering, aching tragedy better than Montgomery Clift. The women are cast against type. Deborah Kerr was a British actress best known for playing prim characters in musicals (her Anna in The King and I, made three years after From Here to Eternity, is a typical Kerr role), but here she is an unhappy adulteress. Donna Reed is best known as James Stewart’s wife in It’s a Wonderful Life, but she is a hooker with a heart of gold in From Here to Eternity. Of the sextet, all but Borgnine were rewarded with Oscar nominations (making From Here to Eternity one of the rare films containing a nominated performance in each of the four acting categories). The entire cast grounds their characters in reality, giving humanistic and emotional performances blending perfectly with the tone Zinnemann establishes for the picture.

By the time the Japanese planes roll in, I became so spellbound that I forgot, momentarily, that the shadow of Pearl Harbor loomed over the whole picture. Like the wave crashing down on Karen and Sgt. Warden, I was shocked to my system. History came crashing down upon me as I was watching this superb melodrama, and delivered the cruelest of ironies. No matter how at odds we may each be with our own personal conflicts, no matter how unconquerable our differences may be, history is the great leveler—an irresistible force and an immovable object rolled into one.

DETAILS

From Here to Eternity (1953)

Director: Fred Zinnemann

Starring: Burt Lancaster, Montgomery Clift, Deborah Kerr, Frank Sinatra, Donna Reed, Ernest Borgnine, Philip Ober, George Reeves*

Studio: Columbia Pictures

Total Oscars: 8 (Best Picture, Best Director—Fred Zinnemann, Best Supporting Actor—Frank Sinatra**, Best Supporting Actress—Donna Reed, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography (B&W), Best Editing, Best Sound Recording) out of 13 total nominations (Best Actor—Montgomery Clift, Best Actor—Burt Lancaster, Best Actress—Deborah Kerr, Best Costume Design (B&W), Best Score)

*According to a legendary Hollywood rumor, George Reeves, best known for playing Superman in the 1950’s, had his scenes as Sgt. Maylon Stark cut because audiences at a preview screening—too familiar with his exponentially more famous role as the Man of Steel—couldn’t buy Reeves in the part. Director Zinnemann maintained that the role of Stark remained the same throughout all drafts of the screenplay, and there was no preview screening. This controversy is depicted as truth in the 2006 film Hollywoodland, about Reeves’ life and suspicious death.
**Another famous Hollywood urban legend involves Sinatra securing the role of Maggio. By the early 1950’s Sinatra’s career had stalled to the point of isolation, and Columbia Studios head Harry Cohn favored Eli Wallach in the role. The very famous scene in The Godfather with the severed horse’s head as an “offer he can’t refuse” was based on this urban legend, with the characters of Johnny Fontaine and Jack Woltz as Sinatra and Cohn, respectively. The story has no basis in fact. More likely is that actress Ava Gardner, Sinatra’s wife at the time used her influence with Cohn to gain influence for her husband.

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